Exodus 20:1-3 (NIV) And God spoke all these words: 2 “I am the Lord your God, who
brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 3 “You shall have no
other gods before me.
One God and one goal make a difference
to the way we live. Our mind may tell us we believe in God, but what does our
life tell us? Is there unity, focus, purpose, direction, and a measure of
peace, or are we scattered and strained from serving many unnamed, invisible gods? I am the Lord your God, You shall
have no other gods before me. Notice that
it is not just any one god that we are called to serve. The issue is not just
one god, but what kind of one god that we serve. The Hebrew has a peculiar
expression here. The phrase “before me” literally means “to my face” and was an
expression used of a man who took a second wife when his first wife was still
alive. It had to do with breaching a relationship. You shall have no other gods before me calls us into an exclusive
relationship to this particular god “YAWEH,” to the God revealed in the Hebrew
Scriptures of the Old Testament and uniquely revealed in Jesus Christ. We are
called to an exclusive relationship to a particular God. When we get married,
we do not say we promise to treat our spouse equally as well as we treat other
men and women in our life. Marriage is a call to an exclusive relationship as
is our call to have no other God before YAWEH.
And that is where the rub to this
command comes. There is risk in the demand for an exclusive relationship. When our
faith is focused on this one God, we run the risk of being narrow minded. How do we know when we are being
narrow-minded and when we are being focused? When we make an exclusive commitment to this One God, we set
limits on what we will believe. We set boundaries on how we will live. What is
the difference between setting boundaries and being intolerant? Do you ever
have those kinds of questions? Those kinds of feelings?
How do we know if we are obeying this
command? It is like a commitment to a marriage relationship. It is an inward
decision and an outward action. Simply living together is not marriage.
Marriage commitment changes the relationship. We need the decision. We need the
inward giving of ourselves to God however we decide and do it. We don’t drift
into marriage and we do not drift into an exclusive commitment to God. There
needs to be this inner decision and commitment to an exclusive relationship to
the God whose name is Lord.
Relationship demands that we do things
to nurture it, and there are several things that we do to nurture this
exclusive relationship to God. We worship. We pray. We study. We have our daily
devotional time. If we are not doing these things regularly and faithfully the
relationship is eroding. We can know we are obeying this command if we have made
the inward decision and commitment to an exclusive relationship to the Lord and
if we are faithfully doing something to nurture that relationship.
From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs
Pope June 2, 1996
© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell (Broyles)
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